The usually subdued Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for years, is apoplectic about the court's surprise decision to take up Obamacare subsidies even as the circuit courts are still grappling with the issue.

One reason the GOP is making so much noise about the surprise climate change deal with China is that the lack of action by China has long been a central line of attack on any US efforts to take action on carbon emissions. So long as China wasn't moving, what difference would it make if the US moved, other than to further disadvantage US business? At least that's how the GOP argument went.

Climate Desk has a great reel up showing just how prevalent this line of attack was from Republicans.

You can't assess the Supreme Court's surprise jump today into the Obamacare subsidies pseudo-controversy without appreciating that there was a big organized effort in the conservative legal community to create the political and legal space for the Supreme Court to intervene. Part of that effort involved working to delegitimize in advance the pending en banc decision of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals as purely political and without legal foundation. Here's the full rundown on what was being done on the outside to push the Supreme Court toward the decision it made today.

Nicholas Bagley at The Incidental Economist doesn't attach as much significance as I do to the decision of the Supreme Court to take up the Obamacare subsidies issue in the absence of a split of the circuit courts. But he thinks it's very significant that at least four justices were willing to take the case:
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